Gas lawn equipment is horrible for health here’s how these cities are fixing it [Video]

A new interactive mapping tool shows how a growing number of US cities and states have passed regulations restricting the use of gas-powered lawn equipment, or incentivizing the use of electric equipment, with big clean air benefits for a comparatively small investment.

While gas lawn equipment use may seem like it’s not all that big a deal at first glance, gas leafblowers and lawnmowers can actually extremely bad for air and human health – sometimes moreso than cars.

The issue is that “small off-road engines” (SOREs) usually don’t include any sort of pollution controls, and are often dirtier two-stroke engines that create more power in a small package, but emit orders of magnitude more pollution in the form of unburned particulates from the incomplete combustion process they undergo when compared to four-stroke engines.

As a result, running a gas leaf blower for an hour can produce more emissions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) and reactive organic gases (ROG) than …